“We have to get a lot smarter, faster.”
Yeah, thanks for that! Here I was having a nice casual call with my colleague Susan Einhorn, and she pops this comment out. But you know, she’s right.
I mean if we’re even vaguely serious when we talk about the explosive growth of information that is now available to us, and the exponential rate of change in the modern world around us, frankly it’s a logical consequence isn’t it?
But how do we do that?
Well, one thing for sure, if we think the answer is to simply read more books more often and faster, then we’re doomed to a rather dull existence, and well, that’s not really being a lot smarter is it?
No, to me the real problem is deciding what really matters, and what’s really worth knowing...and doing so in the context of the modern world we live in. So how about we think for a moment about the implications for our schools.
I mean, you all know how it goes. Oh, someone has decided our students need some ‘Maker Time’ or an ‘Hour … [Read more...]

I’m curious about curiosity. It's not something we have talked enough about in the past, but in a society that celebrates creativity and innovative thinking, I feel it will be a lot more prominent in the future. So when I hear someone say that it’s a pity their kids aren’t more curious, I wonder what their motivation in saying that is. Surely you must learn to be curious because you need to be curious to learn. So what’s going on?
If we assume our young people arrive on the planet curious about the world around them, asking questions about anything and everything, what happens to them? Do they just ‘lose’ their natural curiosity and 'grow out of it', or is it that we really do manage to teach the curiosity out of them? If curiosity is really the essential food of learning, then the obvious question is, why don’t we focus more on developing searchingly curious minds as a priority in our students? While we’re tripping the 21stCentury learning light fantastic, maybe we should have been … [Read more...]

In our newest podcast, Will and Bruce discuss the new Change.School learning community, and they talk about the history of Modern Learners and how it's led to this new push to raise the bar on reimagining schools. It's a little bit of backstory, but it's a lot of how we got to the "How?"
Change.School has its genesis in the thousands of conversations that Will and Bruce have had with leaders from around the world who are guiding change projects in their schools. In fact, it's built on the idea that despite being really hard work, reimagination is possible, that the ingredients are clear, but that every school is on it's own unique path to change. Right now, building leadership capacity to do high-bar change in existing schools is where the most important work in education lies.
The notes for this episode are short because everything you really need to know can be found at change.school. Yes, .school is now an extension! … [Read more...]

Brandon Busteed of Gallup made this interesting comment during a session at SXSWedu in Austin on Monday:
“Apprenticeships double the odds that you end up engaged in your work over your lifetime.”
This shouldn’t seem shocking to anyone in education, though it should give us pause. How many opportunities do we give kids to do real world work in our classrooms and schools? Busteed reported that only about 10 percent of college students get the chance real world work for real purposes over time during their tenure at university. Ten percent. I'm sure it's way less in high school.
Yet my sense is that most people would agree that having the chance to apprentice with professionals who are engaged in work that you want to do would be a pretty great way of learning about that work. The research and writing into exactly how much of what we learn about our jobs is learned on the job is clear, and it’s compelling. The vast majority of what we learn is learned tacitly, by doing the work. Only … [Read more...]

When you think about it, learning is a rather quaint, but deceptively powerful word which we continually use, abuse and misuse in our work almost every day. Yet we see it constantly trivialised and thrown about like confetti across so many different contexts it's no wonder that it's real meaning is then lost in so many of the critical conversations around the purpose of school.
For some, it's simply seen as a measure of intellect when someone is described as being learned or scholarly; at other times it is taken as a function of teaching, as in the oxymoronic “she only learned what she was taught."
Still many use it as a comfort word within schools when they talk about 'learning spaces" and being "learner centered." In recent years it has become fashionable to preface it with an adjective such as "flipped," "blended," "personalized," "deeper" et al. as if the word ‘learning’ on its own is simply not capable of conveying significant meaning.
Now we all know it’s not … [Read more...]

How often have you ever had to wait for a taxi that never seems to come, or in fact never does? And how do you respond to that prolonged wait? Frustration, anger?
So, what was so different about Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp who, on a snowy Paris evening in 2008 also had trouble hailing a cab? Their response. They invented Uber. There wasn’t a start-up incubator on that street corner in Paris; they didn’t ideate or even iterate. They simply dared to re-imagine what alternatives might be possible.
So how was it that every one of us who has been frustrated waiting for a cab didn’t do a similar thing? And by the way, why were so many cab companies so slow in responding to what was a very simple idea that could have been replicated so easily?
It doesn’t matter whether you agree with Christenson’s thinking around disruption or not; Uber has not only disrupted the taxi industry but now also the prepared meals service, shared rides and much more. And of course, Uber is just one … [Read more...]

A snowy start to the year can certainly slow things down a lot in the North of our planet, and below the equator, a sharp dose of summer will mean lying on beaches to enjoy the end of the summer vacation. So maybe we all did need a wake-up call to get us going this year.
So, we can thank the politics of the world’s greatest democracy (sic) these past few weeks for bringing us back to reality, and make sure we were all paying attention. No doubt a few of you have had to recheck your calendars to be sure the year isn’t 1984, with all of our post-truths, and "alternative facts."
But let’s for a second look pst the distractions, as difficult as they may be, and see what we can learn. Yes, we know we learn from great leaders, be they educational, corporate, or indeed, political. In politics, we’ve read about the courage and wisdom of people like Mandela, Lincoln or Churchill. In recent times, while I’m not sure we have seen a lot of "shining lights," I am intrigued by what Prime … [Read more...]

From the outset, understand that I have no idea where this post is going to end up. It's one of those posts that's going to have to write itself, struggling from one sentence to the next, stepping down a path that's not real visible to some unknown destination that may or may not be a place worth visiting.
So, be advised.
As much as I've tried to step back from all things politics the last couple of months, the last few days it's obviously been a bit hard to do that. And on Sunday, the phrase "alternative facts" seemed to seep into my streams from all directions. I watched the video. I read some of the reactions, and surfed some of the Tweets. (Nothing like a good meme to get you back in the swing of the news, eh?)
These are truly such interesting times, no? I've written before that a part of me feels like it's watching the beginning of the end of democracy, while another part of me feels like this may just be the wakeup call that we all needed to get serious about the … [Read more...]

Have you ever found yourself looking for something when you don’t know what it is that you’re looking for? It usually happens when you are looking for solutions to a problem and you find habits of your past distract you from thinking clearly, and the most obvious answers evade you.
In many ways, I think this reflects the problem we are facing in our schools today. On the one hand, there's a growing consensus across many countries that our schools are struggling to keep abreast of the scope and scale of changes in the world today, while on the other, finding solutions has proved both elusive and a real challenge.
In the first instance, the problem is often misdiagnosed, usually by politicians or the populist media, and accordingly, the wrong solutions follow. We’re all only too familiar with examples of this which, while too numerous to list here, are noisily represented by rhetoric from one of three directions: We need more of the same (testing); we need to improve existing … [Read more...]

Stay with me on this. Its a topic that I think warrants a little more than we normally share here, and I promise, no politics and no mention of the “T” word...
I’m not sure if you’re fully aware, but right now there are signs of a fundamental shift in the way our students will access higher education in the near future, and ultimately it will have implications for K-12 which I feel we need to be prepared for.
While we were all might have been enamoured with many of the early online learning innovations around the turn of the century such as MIT OpenCourseware and later that decade the pioneering MOOC’s of Stephen Downes, George Siemens, and Dave Cormier, the longer term impact was that it provoked us to further explore how the internet and ubiquitous access to technology could and should impact higher education.
Who could not fail to be impressed when some 155,000 people signed up for the MIT course on Circuits and Electronics in 2012, while Sebastian Thurn and Peter Norvig’s … [Read more...]